The LIGO/Virgo collaboration has recently announced the direct detection of
gravitational waves emitted in the coalescence of a neutron star binary. This
discovery allows, for the first time, to set new constraints on the behavior of
matter at supranuclear density, complementary with those coming from
astrophysical observations in the electromagnetic band. In this paper we
demonstrate the feasibility of using gravitational signals to solve the
relativistic inverse stellar problem, i.e. to reconstruct the parameters of the
equation of state (EoS) from measurements of the stellar mass and tidal Love
number. We perform Bayesian inference of mock data, based on different models
of the star internal composition, modeled through piecewise polytropes. Our
analysis shows that the detection of a small number of sources by a network of
advanced interferometers would allow to put accurate bounds on the EoS
parameters, and to perform a model selection among the realistic equations of
state proposed in the literature.Comment: minor changes to match the version published on PR
